Critical Essay by Peter L. Hays and Richard Dilworth Rust

In the following essay, Hays and Rust interpret Billy Budd as a reworking of Melville's relationship with his own sons.

Every thoughtful reader of Billy Budd, Sailor (An Inside Narrative) feels to some degree or another the great power of the book which Richard Harter Fogle calls a “profound meditation upon a tragic theme of great magnitude.”1 Indeed, we are led to wonder about the motivation of Melville to write such a work out of the “quiet, grass-growing” years of his life, especially since he had devoted the last thirty years of his life to poetry. While considering Billy...